For centuries, a wedding was a deal between two families before it was a love story, and painters often showed the deal more clearly than the couple. One king sent a stand-in to say his vows. At one crowded village feast, nobody can say which guest is the groom.
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A marriage used to settle money, land and rank between two families, and the couple came after. A wedding put all of it in one room: the families, the church or the law, and a crowd of guests who each had a part to play.
It also came with fixed gestures that a painting can stop in mid-air. Two hands join, a ring slides onto a finger, a purse crosses a table, a pen moves over a register.
A picture made this list only if the marriage, the betrothal or the feast that seals it is its subject, not a detail in a corner. In most of them, the couple shares the frame with what made the marriage possible or difficult. The order runs from the less familiar pictures to the most recognized.
12. Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride (c. 1665)
Over a woman's chest, a man's right hand rests flat, and her left hand lies on top of it to keep it there. Rembrandt van Rijn pressed the couple close together against a dark ground, in heavy folds of red and gold, in Amsterdam around 1665.
Rembrandt never gave the picture a title, and that gap is where its story begins. In the early nineteenth century, a collector saw in it a Jewish father fastening a necklace around his daughter's neck on her wedding day, and the nickname The Jewish Bride stuck. Yet that reading fits almost nothing on the canvas. The two stand too close, and touch each other too tenderly, to be father and daughter, and scholars have doubted the story for decades.
Most historians now look instead to the Book of Genesis. Isaac and Rebecca, husband and wife, are traveling through a foreign land, and Isaac, afraid that a husband's claim on a beautiful wife will get him killed, tells the local people she is his sister. Later the king of that land looks out of his window, sees Isaac caressing her and understands at once that they are married.
From that whole episode, Rembrandt kept only the caress. Nothing behind the couple shows a room, a window or a king, so the hand on her chest, the touch that gave them away, sits alone at the center of the canvas. He had already drawn the same subject around 1662. Her other hand rests low on her skirt, away from the embrace, with a ring on one finger.
The painting's official title now names Isaac and Rebecca first and keeps The Jewish Bride only as the name it is known by. The nickname has outlived the guess that produced it.
At a Glance
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn
Painted: About 1665 to 1669
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 121.5 × 166.5 cm (48 × 65.5 in)
Where to see it: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
11. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Wedding Dance (1566)
About a hundred and twenty-five peasants dance in a field ringed by trees, while a bagpiper plays near the right edge of the panel. Pieter Bruegel the Elder dated the scene 1566. A few rows back, a woman in black dances level with everyone else, her hair loose.
She is the bride. Infrared scans made in 2019 show that Bruegel first gave her a crown, the usual bridal sign of the period, then took it away. The men around her wear a sign of their own, and at some point someone found it offensive enough to attack the paint.